Sulka's Journal: DB server

I was thinking of submitting this to Ask Slashdot but then thought I'd dig for more information before posting it. I guess the slashdot journal is as good a place to store this as any. :)

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I took the task of creating a spec for a heavy-duty Linux database server and it's proving out to be much harder than I thought. Experienced in this? Please help! I'm intentionally not saying which (open source) DB I'm running.

One of the first things I did was to check out what slashdot is using. Unfortunately, that's a VA Linux box and thus not available. The configuration sounded good though, I started to surf for something similar. The system I'm aiming for at the moment is 2-4 CPU rack-mountable machine with 2GB RAM, hotswap RAID5 with 5 drives and one hot spare. Where can I find a box like this, without paying oodles

Putting the drives on an external enclosure sounds interesting. Anyone have experience on this? This would certainly make it easier to pick a machine.